Singing In The Rain

Over the last 3 days it has been pouring rain every morning. While in the States I typically love the rain, in Acornhoek it just makes my life difficult. I woke up the first morning of rainfall to discover my main living area covered in a pool of water. Apparently, the wind was blowing the rain in. Unfortunately for me it is too hot to close the windows so I decided a wet living room was the better idea.

I got in my car to leave for work and found a pool of water on the floor of the back seat – guess my last passenger forgot to roll up the window all the way, which is dangerous for this area because monkey’s love getting into cars and pooping and peeing on everything. It is their way of marking their territory. So in hinds sight water is better than monkeys. Although, I quickly realized that pools of water also attract large numbers of mosquitoes. At least they had a nice meal out of me.

I started the car and found that the wind shield wipers didn’t feel like working that day. So I rolled down the window and tried to drive with my head out the window. That lasted for about 30 seconds till I decided that it was a dumb idea – not being able to see wasn’t that bad. I continued my drive down the now washed out dirt road ridden with potholes the size of small houses and bumps bigger than large tree trunks. I know, I know , I too am waiting for my tires to fall off the car or the engine to just fall out. My car makes such a noise as it is, the bumps are surely not helping things.

As I continued to the tar road (as they like to call it) I picked up my speed to about 60MPH which is really the fastest you can go in this area to make sure you don’t hit an animal or hit a pothole. Oh and yes, people hit animals all the time – not armadillos or squirrels we are used to but real animals, Warthogs, Impalas, Cows, Water Buck and just last week someone hit an elephant! Anyways, I digress. So as I continued down the tar road I noticed a car stopped ahead of me. A stream was now crossing the road. The man was outside his car collecting the water in a huge bin. I slowed down and once I realized the water wasn’t going to wash my car away I continued.

Today I happen to have a meeting about 30minutes away at a home based care organization. Thankfully, I had picked up one of my colleagues for the meeting so I didn’t have to drive alone. As we continued on, I hit pot hole after pot hole just bracing for impact. My windshield wipers were still not working and now the window was completely fogged up. Wow, the luxury of an air conditioner I am starting to miss.

Faith, my colleague, directed me to turn right down a dirt road. I turned right and immediately noticed the terrible shape of the road – there were streams washing away the path and rocks were now exposed that would pop a tire in an instant. As I preceded down the road slower than a turtle, I was just hoping the next road wouldn’t be worse. Of course, it was. This road was not only steep, had potholes, and rocks, but there were random patches of grass so you couldn’t even see where not to drive, a fun guessing game. At this point I had Faith wiping the inside of the window and I had my hand out the window trying to wipe away the rain – as you can imagine extremely productive. We finally arrived at the home based care site.

A meeting was about to start when we walked in. They were just finishing up their prayers (mandatory before any meeting here). We had a two hour meeting with Mama Anna, the head of the home based care organization, after our meeting she walked us through the facility and through the garden. There were over 50 children in the garden smiling and pulling weeds. I asked Faith why the children were so happy to be pulling weeds in the rain. She said that the children were excited for the rain because it would ensure they were feed that week. All the children were orphans and without the garden they would have no food to eat. Mama Anna must have heard me ask such a silly question and made us follow her down the road to the village. All the women were outside washing their clothes. Every container they had in their house was outside to collect the water. She turned to me and told me, “when it rains it is time to rejoice, bath ourselves, clean our clothes, and use everything the sky has to offer.”

Now doesn’t that just put my day into perspective?! Now I understood why the man had stopped to collect the water from the stream that had formed across the road and why the children walking to school without umbrellas were laughing and playing. When it rains again I will be sure to be singing in the rain.